Posts by Joshua

Robert Botine Cunninghame Graham; Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco; 1898; a travelogue describing the conditions that gave rise to the Greek->Arabic loan-word bikouros, a pernicious title given to lazy Christian missionaries by reference to the name of Epicurus.

So I've been thinking of getting into some light game modding and I've been getting into the worldbuilding side of Frank Herbert's Dune, one of the greatest sci-fi worlds ever made. His stories are set in our galaxy, but in a far distant future where Earth is nothing but a faint memory and mankind has spread across the stars. Herbert's narrative texture relies for its effect on extrapolating the development of human language, religion, and folkways across this vast scale of time, and words from todays languages are used freely by the representative culture. So I came across this in my reading from Dune Messiah;

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"You are the instrument I was taught to play," Bijaz said. "I am playing you. Let me tell you the names of the other traitors among the Naibs. They are Bikouros and Cahueit. There is Djedida, who was secretary to Korba. There is Abumojandis, the aide to Bannerjee. Even now, one of them could be sinking a blade into your Muad'dib."

This is expanded on elsewhere; "Bicouros of Shaitan; "a lazy missionary of the devil". Somebody who serves an evil purpose out of lazyness or to achieve privileges.

I've read this book before, but only now did "Bikouros" leap out at me. And it turns out, there's something to it! One of Herbert's many sources was a book by Cunninghame Graham called Mogreb-el-Acksa: A Journey in Morocco, published in 1898. It will be useful to remember how Maimonides in his Guide to the Perplexed turned Epicurus' name into a bad word with apikoros, a skeptic or apostate. Graham in his book suggests that bikouros developed independently of apikoros, and in an unusual way;

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Almost all Europeans in Morocco must of necessity be merchants, if not they must be consuls, for there is hardly any other industry open to them to choose. The [christian] missionaries bought and sold nothing, they were not consuls; still they ate and drank, lived in good houses, and though not rich yet passed their lives in what the Jews called luxury. So they [the Jews] agreed to call them followers of Epicurus, for, as they said, "this Epicurus was a devil who did naught but eat and drink." The nickname stuck, and changed into Bikouros by the Moors, who thought it was a title of respect, became the name throughout Morocco for a missionary. One asks as naturally for the house of Epicurus on coming to a town as one asks for the "Checquers" or the "Bells" in rural England. Are you "Bikouros"? says a Moor, and thinks he does you honour by the inquiry; but the recipients of the name are fit to burst when they reflect on their laborious days spent in the surgery, their sowing seed upon the marble quarries of the people's hearts, and that the Jews in their malignity should charge upon them by this cursed name, that they live in Morocco to escape hard work, and pass their time in eating and In in quaffing healths a thousand fathoms deep.

"Checquers" and "Bells"? Is that tax-collectors and church bells (tolling someone's death)?

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Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or by the prospect of pain: what possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable? One so situated must possess in the first place a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain; he will know that death means complete unconsciousness, and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong, so that its intensity is compensated by brief duration and its continuance by diminishing severity. Let such a man moreover have no dread of any supernatural power; let him never suffer the pleasures of the past to fade away, but constantly renew their enjoyment in recollection, and his lot will be one which will not admit of further improvement.

-Cicero, On Ends

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Crisscrossing the sandy sandy shore were lines of barley flour, carefully poured out by workmen walking behind teams of surveyors who calculated angles and distances using tools unchanged since the days of the pyramid builders. The entire area now lay under a net of these white lines, attended to by countless small birds that did their best to eat them as fast as they were laid.

-The Rise and Fall of Alexandria, by Justin Pollard and Howard Reid

I've only just made the connection--this is a description of how Dinocrates and Alexander laid out the principle design of the city plan of Alexandria. They used barley flour because it fed the army and they had plenty of it, and because Egypt lacked the chalk that was so typical of Greece.

Part of that text is black, Cassius

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It means he gains his bread and wine through his military exploits. He earns them by means of his military prowess.

Somewhat similar to the phrasing used in the film Troy;

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Nestor: How many battles have we won off the edge of his sword? This will be the greatest war the world has ever seen. We need the greatest warrior.

Possibly the confusion comes from the feast of the 20th, in which more people would have gathered and eaten more and better food.

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As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellences—belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the good of human-kind—and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being, on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful.

-The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, on his Father

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The όρους is the familiar "boundary stone" used elsewhere in Epicurean texts:

- boundary, limit, frontier, landmark

- marking stones, stones used for inscribing legal contracts

Which came into Latin as ora, as used in Lucretius in phrases like "shining borders of the light". For boundary-stone he uses the phrase Alta termina haerens, going from memory.

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One of the issues at play here seems to be the use of the words "good" and "bad" which begins to - albeit unconsciously - give desire and pain and pleasure a moral coloring.

I resist this formulation as well. Also, the word "natural" has become hugely problematic--Natural Law, so called, is something like a 4th revelation in Christianity after the person of Jesus and the two testaments. Montaigne made the odd claim that atheism was 'unnatural', and the claims have only gotten worse since.

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I think I can work up a good head of steam to argue that desire is at the root of what it means to be alive, which is why advocacy of suppression of all desire strikes me as so "evil."

Yes, but that's not my position either.

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I think an argument can readily be made that these feelings of desire are not problems, but the healthy functioning we should wish to occur, and that we find these spurs to action pleasurable rather than painful.

But that's exactly what pain is--a healthfully functioning signal that something is wrong and needs to change.

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When we lose all desire, we die. In a very real sense life IS at root the desire for pleasure. Robots and the dead cannot feel or desire. Is not in a very real sense life the ability to desire?

This is true also for pain.

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Would the Epicurean gods feel pleasure in their blessedness if they did not desire that pleasure?

It's not clear to me how desire for a thing and the experience of a thing can reside together--the pleasure fulfills the desire. I'm no longer thirsty after I've drunk...

If the gods desire what they already have, this sounds more to me like they're jealous of what they have, which seems to imply a fear that they could lose it.

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The question remains whether they are feelings, sensations, thoughts, or something else....

This is really what we need to figure out. I could be convinced (maybe) that desire is not necessarily a kind of pain, but I really reject including it among pleasures. The very existence of desire indicates a lack of satisfaction.

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From that table above, desire (epithymia) is a feeling of something that results in some pleasure. The opposite of desire is fear (phobos) which appears to be a feeling repelling against something that leads to pain.

I'm not sure I can get on board with the underlined part above. Lucian opposes fear to hope, which I think is nearer the mark;

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And from this point, as Thucydides might say, the war takes its beginning. These ambitious scoundrels were quite devoid of scruples, and they had now joined forces; it could not escape their penetration that human life is under the absolute dominion of two mighty principles, fear and hope (ἐλπίδος καὶ φόβου) and that anyone who can make these serve his ends may be sure of a rapid fortune.

Which drives me on to my next (tentative) conclusion--that fear and hope are both kinds of desire. Desire is everything that happens when you see things as they are, and wish that they were different. When unscrupulous scoundrels prey on hope and fear, they prey on desire.

And now for the tricky part--if I defend my thesis that desire presents as a feeling of pain, how do I avoid the path that Cassius is rightly concerned about? In truth I don't think there's a real problem here, because I don't think that pain is necessarily "bad" or "evil". If I lean against a hot stove, I ought to be thankful that nature has furnished a biological alarm system warning me to move quickly, or risk serious injury. Rocks and gods and corpses can get by without pain, but not me--I need pain in order to go on living. Some rare people don't experience pain, and are at high risk for an early or sudden death;

Congenital insensitivity to pain - Wikipedia

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Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP), also known as congenital analgesia, is one or more extraordinarily rare conditions in which a person cannot feel (and has never felt) physical pain.[1] The conditions described here are separate from the HSAN group of disorders, which have more specific signs and cause. Because feeling physical pain is vital for survival, CIP is an extremely dangerous condition.[1] It is common for people with the condition to die in childhood due to injuries or illnesses going unnoticed.[1][2] Burn injuries are among the more common injuries.

So I don't want to lose the sensation of pain. I also very generally don't want to experience the sensation of pain--it's necessary, and very natural, but it doesn't feel good--I'd rather experience continuous pleasure.

I think it's like that with desire. I understand that I have a 2 or 3 pound mammalian brain, and that, having that, I am driven almost constantly by the desire for things that are likewise desired by nearly all other mammals--the desire for food, water, shelter, warmth, sex, rest, etc. In addition to these are the particularly human desires, cultivated by things like community engagement, culture, society, economics, etc.

I cannot fulfill all of my desires. Moreover, Epicurus recognized a tendency in us to develop new desires when we have worn out or satisfied the old ones. If desire is a kind of pain, as I argue, and if I cannot fulfill all of my desires, the question naturally arises as to what I should do about them. It is by no means obvious or self-evident that, because desire is a kind of pain, the only thing left to do is to spurn desire, suppress it, condemn it, or bury it in a hole. I have basically four options; I can try to fulfill them all, and inevitably fail. I can spit contempt on them all, and probably end up dead sooner than later. I can proceed more or less reactively and without a plan, satisfying the easy desires as they pass and seldom reaching far for the difficult ones. Or I can develop and establish a plan of choice and avoidance, with the goal of maximizing pleasurable outcomes over the course of a whole human life. Some desires will have to be put by; some will have to be vigorously rejected; some will be indulged for the sake of pleasure, and some other few will be made into something like a life's ambition--the desire which, well-chosen, will become the theme of a life well-lived.

Can we expect such an outcome from desire, if desire is a kind of pain? Why not? Pain is not nature's moral or judicial punishment--pain, like pleasure, is one of nature's guide-posts. Desire and pain direct us toward lives of pleasure and remembrance--the happy memory of all that we have come to enjoy in our lives. If there is an opposite to desire, then let that be it.

I rather think that Epicurus dismissed poetry as a great source of lies, as Lucian expresses in his True History:

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This attraction is in the veiled reference underlying all the details of my narrative; they parody the cock-and-bull stories of ancient poets, historians, and philosophers; I have only refrained from adding a key because I could rely upon you to recognize as you read...as I have no truth to put on record, having lived a very humdrum life, I fall back on falsehood — but falsehood of a more consistent variety; for I now make the only true statement you are to expect — that I am a liar. This confession is, I consider, a full defense against all imputations. My subject is, then, what I have neither seen, experienced, nor been told, what neither exists nor could conceivably do so. I humbly solicit my readers’ incredulity.

Lucretius acknowledges this as well. The bitter wormwood of philosophy needs honey, or the people who need it won't accept it--they must be "charmed", not to say deceived, into taking their medicine.

Very cool! If you start from the brown leather on the left and go to the red leather on the right, that's 8 total if you count Creech as one. Stephen Greenblatt records that Jefferson had "five Latin texts of De Rerum Natura, along with translations in English, Italian, and French." So the numbers don't allow for a second English translation, if in fact there are only 8. Greenblatt does not give the total sum.

While I'm at it with quotations, let's add first Menander, and then Lucian;

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Hail, you twin-born sons of Neocles, of whom the one saved his country from slavery, the other from folly.

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Alexander once made himself supremely ridiculous. Coming across Epicurus’s Principal Doctrines, the most admirable of his books, as you know, with its terse presentment of his wise conclusions, he brought it into the middle of the marketplace, there burned it on a figwood fire for the sins of its author, and cast its ashes into the sea. He issued an oracle on the occasion: “The dotard’s doctrines to the flames be given.” The fellow had no conception of the blessings conferred by that book upon its readers, of the peace, tranquillity, and independence of mind it produces, of the protection it gives against terrors, phantoms, and marvels, vain hopes and insubordinate desires, of the judgment and candor that it fosters, or of its true purging of the spirit, not with torches and squills and such rubbish, but with right reason, truth, and frankness.

Show Notes:

Stephen Greenblatt' mother:

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The young Greenblatt didn’t fear his own death, but he was instilled with a deep fear of his mother’s death, thanks to his mother, who possessed “an absolute certainty that she was destined for an early grave”. Greenblatt writes: “My life was full of extended, operatic scenes of farewell...even when I simply left the house for school, she clung to me tightly, speaking of her fragility and of the distinct possibility that I would never see her again.”

Mrs Greenblatt's fears turned out to be unfounded - she lived until she was almost 90 - but Stephen was very struck by how the fear of death could make life unliveable.

Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow:

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We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

John Augustus Shedd

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A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Michel de Montaigne

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I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.”

XKCD

xkcd: Click and Drag

(Click and drag)

Friar Laurence, Romeo and Juliet:

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...Hence from Verona art thou banished:

Be patient, for the world is broad and wide...

I'll give thee armour to keep off that word:

Adversity's sweet milk, philosophy,

To comfort thee, though thou art banished....

Why rail'st thou on thy birth?

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Sophocles

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Never to have been born is best.

Everyone knows that, and a close second,

once you have appeared in this life, is a quick

return, as soon as you can, to where you came from.

In our light-headed youth we carry

blithe ideas, not knowing what blows await,

what hardships are bearing down, closer and closer.

Murder, hatred, strife, resentment, and

envy are lurking, and then, behind them, bitter old age,

powerless, friendless, with evils our only neighbors.

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Ecclesiastes

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But better than both is the one who has never been born, who has not seen the evil that is done under the sun.

This may serve to illustrate a contrasting approach:

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And he saith unto them, "Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?" Then he arose, and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a great calm. So the men marveled, saying, “Who can this be, that even the winds and the sea obey Him?”

Are they to count on this intercession every time they put to sea? Failing that, their woes are doubled. "Where is God in all of this?"

I heard that said by someone close to me this very week.

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A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.

Hadn't heard that one. John Augustus Shedd.

Have you formulated any opinion as to the meaning of this?

Allow me to free-associate:

In his 31st Vatican Saying, Epicurus writes that "it is possible to provide security against other things, but as far as death is concerned, we men all live in a city without walls."

This condition is not at all times apparent to all of us; so that the necessary first step in philosophical instruction is to convince the student that their's is a condition which requires philosophical intervention. But just as the physician contends not only with injuries and disease, but also with quacks and charlatans who exacerbate them, the philosopher will find that the whole of the earth has been salted against his seeds.

Does he wish to illustrate the precarious condition of his listeners? Their ears are ringing with the promises of a false security--of a life beyond the grave--of the spiritual power of the church and the temporal power of institutions. They--we--must be made to adventure on life, then, so as to remember its perils, and no one who puts forth on open water will have forgotten them.

Epicurus' invitation to the sea is then, rightly understood, an invitation to philosophy. It is an invitation to throw off false security, and in our danger find real peace in the freedom from fear.

There are two 'proverbs' that relate to some of these same or similar ideas as well. "One man's meat is another man's poison", and "as sure as pig likes marjoram". Both 'proverbs' are actually quotations or references to Lucretius.